One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

It is impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Lindbergh in that summer. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Every person on earth who could get near enough wanted to grasp his hand or clap him on the back. He had no private life anymore. Shirts he sent to the laundry never came back. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. He could not go for a walk or pop into a bank or drugstore. If he went into a men’s room, people followed. Checks he wrote were rarely cashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. No part of his life was normal, and there was no prospect that it ever would be again. As Lindbergh was discovering, it was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

Lindbergh was under such constant pressure on the ground that he found the flying between cities the most restful part of his tour, and sometimes introduced long detours into his itineraries to give himself some peace.

“It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that.”

The word television itself was coined by the Russian Constantin Perskyi, for the Paris Exhibition in 1900, though many other names were used for various devices in the early days—iconoscope, radiovisor, electric eye, even electric telescope.

Only Charles Francis Jenkins saw clearly what TV could offer. “The new machine will come to the fireside … with photoplays, the opera and a direct vision of world activities,” he predicted. Though forgotten now—he doesn’t even have an entry in the American Dictionary of National Biography—Jenkins was an accomplished inventor. He owned over four hundred patents, several of them for successful products, some of which we use yet.

At the heart of Farnsworth’s system was something called an image-dissector camera, which allowed him to paint (as it were) pictures across a screen by scanning them in electronically one line at a time—and to do it so quickly that the eye was fooled into thinking it was seeing a series of continuous images. Even in its earliest versions Farnsworth’s system had 150 lines, giving it a crispness that no mechanical system could ever achieve.

Radio now took off. At the time of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, one American home in five hundred had a radio. Within five years, the proportion was one in twenty. By the end of the decade, saturation would be nearly total.

Sarnoff was only too happy to take advantage of this. He found, as he suspected, that listeners didn’t mind advertisements at all. By its second year on air, NBC was selling over $10 million worth of ads a year. By the early 1930s, radio advertising was worth over $40 million a year in a market that was shrunken by the Great Depression. Newspaper advertising fell by a third, and magazine ads by closer to a half as radio advertising took off.

Now RCA waged much the same sort of battle against Farnsworth. It maintained that Farnsworth could not have conceived of electronic television in 1922 on the grounds that a fifteen-year-old schoolboy could hardly have come up with an idea that had eluded the most brilliant minds of science and technology for years. Luckily for Farnsworth, his old chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, was able to produce his original sketch in court. That, and the fact that Farnsworth possessed the relevant patents, left the court in no doubt. In 1935, it ruled that Farnsworth was “the undisputed inventor of television”—a stunning victory for the lone inventor.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tamer life than Grey—then again who didn’t?—but wrote racier stuff. Three years younger than Grey, Burroughs was born in 1875 into a well-off family in Chicago, but he was something of a black sheep and struggled to find a role for himself in life. He went west as a young man and tried storekeeping, ranching, panning for gold, and working as a railroad policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-five, he produced his first hit, Tarzan of the Apes.

Among serious writers of fiction, only Sinclair Lewis enjoyed robust sales in the summer of 1927. Elmer Gantry was far and away the bestselling fiction work of the year. A satire on evangelist preachers, it was roundly condemned across the nation, especially by evangelist preachers. The fundamentalist firebrand Billy Sunday, apprised of its content, called on God “to strike Lewis dead,” which doesn’t seem terribly Christian of him.

Elmer Gantry was banned in several cities—in Boston, selling it was made an indictable offense, as opposed to just a misdemeanor, as an indication of how severely disagreeable it was—but of course such prohibitions merely made the book seem more juicily desirable to those who could get it. The novel sold 100,000 copies on its first day of sale, and was cruising toward 250,000 by the end of summer—numbers that not even Grey and Burroughs could count on.

Fitzgerald was fading fast in 1927. The Great Gatsby, published two years earlier, had been a failure. Unsold stacks of the book sat in the warehouse of Charles Scribner’s Sons, his publisher, and would still be there when Fitzgerald died, broke and all but forgotten, in 1940. Not until the 1950s would the world rediscover him.

Traditionally, publishing was closed to Jews (except at menial and dead-end levels). All the old firms—Harper & Brothers, Scribner’s, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Putnam’s—were solidly white and largely Protestant, and their output tended to be carefully conservative. That began to change in 1915 when a young Jewish man named Alfred A. Knopf, the son of an advertising executive, started the imprint that still bears his name.

In Re-forging America, Stoddard argued that America should create a “bi-racial” society, by which he meant not one in which people mingled harmoniously, but rather the very opposite: one in which whites and nonwhites were kept separate from cradle to grave so as not to risk cross-contamination to the detriment of either. The book was favorably reviewed in several places.

In 1927 he found temporary salvation from an unlikely source. He brought over from London a play that had been a big success there: Dracula. For the American production, he selected a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi.

Dracula was a huge hit; it ran for a year in New York, then toured for two years more, making Liveright a lot of money when he most needed it.

Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula.

Just three years earlier, when authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. So for that reason alone the play was tremendously exciting. For people inclined to be enlightened, this was a breakout moment.

“Ol’ Man River” turned out to be uncannily like an existing song called “Long-Haired Mamma,” published earlier that year. The composer, Maury Madison, thought so, too, and sued Kern. They settled out of court.

Talking pictures needed actors who were comfortable with the spoken word and writers who could create real dialogue. An enormous exodus was about to begin. Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Bette Davis, W. C. Fields, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson, Leslie Howard, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Cary Grant, Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard, and many more who could be seen in 1927 on Broadway would all shortly decamp to Hollywood. American theater would never be the same again.

He held a group trial for 101 Wobblies who were collectively charged with 17,022 crimes. Despite the complexity of the case, under Landis’s expert guidance the jury took less than an hour to find every one of the defendants guilty.

In 1919, seven members of the White Sox, with names that could almost have been supplied by central casting—Chick Gandil, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, Lefty Williams, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson—agreed to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds for fairly modest payoffs.

In 1919, the cousins launched the tabloid New York Daily News. Remarkably, for the first six years of its existence, they ran it from Chicago. Eventually Patterson went off to New York to focus on the Daily News, leaving McCormick in sole charge of the Tribune.

one of the country’s earliest and most successful radio stations, WGN (short for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”).

When a mobster named Anthony D’Andrea was killed in 1921, eight thousand people attended the funeral. The cortege was two and a half miles long. The honorary pallbearers included twenty-one judges, nine lawyers, and the Illinois state prosecutor.

His first action on reelection was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theater owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than “100 percent American.” Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to decide which books were objectionable enough to be discarded, but he admitted when pressed that he had read none of the books that he was proposing to burn—it

The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. “I now have an America First library,” he said proudly.

Chicago Tribune shortened spelling

Lindbergh’s flight, it has been calculated, spurred as much as $100 million in aviation investments in America. In the mid-1920s, Boeing, a small manufacturer of airplanes in Seattle, had so little work that it sometimes built furniture just to keep going.

Within a year of Lindbergh’s flight it employed a thousand people. Aviation became to the 1930s what radio was to the 1920s.

These were more than just amusing stunts, for his abilities with needle and thread led Carrel to devise helpful new methods for suturing. He invented a way of splicing arteries that kept the interior surface smooth and therefore clot-free, and in so doing saved countless lives.

In the course of a long career, Carrel also performed the first coronary bypass operation (on a dog) and did pioneering work that helped pave the way for organ transplants and tissue grafts later.

There is no evidence to suggest that Charles Lindbergh would ever have countenanced atrocities, but equally when a person speaks of the world as having too many of one kind of person, he is within hailing distance of those who do.

In his book Hitlerland, Andrew Nagorski recounts one incident in which a young boy was flung from an upstairs window into the street below. As the injured boy tried to crawl away, members of the crowd took turns kicking him. He was saved by a passing American. Kristallnacht horrified the world.

For the first time, people began to wonder if Charles Lindbergh was really a suitable hero for the nation. Much worse was to come.

In September 1941, he traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to deliver a speech, to be carried on national radio, explaining why he believed that war with Germany was wrong. A crowd of eight thousand jammed into the Des Moines Coliseum that evening.

American freighters and attacked a naval ship, the USS Greer. Many America First supporters maintained that the American ships had deliberately provoked the attacks, an assertion that many others found outrageous.

Lindbergh’s remarks were met by boos and applause in roughly equal measure. At each interruption he paused till the noise subsided. Not once did he look at the audience or take his eyes from his prepared text.

It was an extraordinary speech, and it finished him as an American hero.

An editorial in the next morning’s Des Moines Register tried to strike a judicious tone. “It may have been courageous for Col. Lindbergh to say what was in his mind,” the Register wrote,

“but it was so lacking in appreciation for consequences—putting the best interpretation on it—that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of leade...

Wendell Willkie, soon to be the Republican Party’s choice for president, called Lindbergh’s speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national repute.” Lindbergh’s name came off streets and schools and airports. Lindbergh Peak became Lone Eagle Peak. In Chicago, the Lindbergh Beacon became the Palmolive Beacon. TWA stopped

calling itself “the Lindbergh Line.”

Even Little Falls, his hometown, painted out Lindbergh’s name on its water tower. President Roosevelt said privately: “I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” Three months later, the J...

Once America entered the war, Lindbergh supported the American cause wholehearted...

Almost thirty years after his death, in 2003, it emerged that Lindbergh had had a far more complicated private life than previously thought. Between 1957 and his death, Lindbergh had conducted a secret long-distance relationship with a German milliner, Brigitte Hesshaimer of Munich, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The children told

reporters that Lindbergh had been “a mystery visitor who would turn up once or twice a year.” They knew he was their father, but thought his name was Careu Kent. According to further reports, Lindbergh also had simultaneous relationships with Brigitte Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, by whom he had two more children, and with a German secretary, identified only as Valeska, with whom he had yet two more children. All this extraordinary bonding was managed with such remarkable discretion that neither Lindbergh’s American family nor his biographer A. Scott Berg had the least notion of it. Quite how Lindbergh managed it all is a story waiting to be told.

Thirteen of the twenty-one games in 1927 had to be abandoned early because the crowds were out of control. In Sioux City, Iowa, two thousand

fans rushed onto the field at one point, and Lou Gehrig was credited with saving the life of a man who was being trampled. Barnstorming proved to be the undoing of Gehrig and Ruth’s friendship.